Steven Enfield (left) moves a bookcase with his wife Diana Bowen and their son Henry, an incoming Kindergartner, at Daniel Webster Elementary School in San Francisco, Calif., on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2009 where parents and other volunteers cleaned up and painted classrooms for the new school year.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Steven Enfield (left) moves a bookcase with his wife Diana Bowen...

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Jane Phan prepares a Kindergarten classroom wall for a fresh coat of paint at Daniel Webster Elementary School in San Francisco, Calif., on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2009.

Jennifer Betti had a simple wish: She wanted to walk her son to school, and she didn't want to have to move from her Potrero Hill home to a suburb to do it.

Up the hill was an elementary school, a run-down school with 1980s orange paint and so few students the school board was days from a vote to shutter it.

Betti's son Roman was just a toddler at the time, the early days of 2006, and she knew she had only one chance to make her wish come true: save Daniel Webster Elementary School.

Keeping it open would be the first step. Really saving it, well, that was something else altogether.

Betti was among seven moms and a dad who decided to try.

"I had no idea - none of us had any idea - what we were getting ourselves into," Betti said. "We just wanted a chance."

The journey they took is not for the faint-hearted or those easily discouraged by bureaucratic barriers and a stubborn status quo. It is, however, a lesson in how to take a low-performing, rejected, inner-city school and turn it into a middle-class magnet.

On Monday, Betti will walk her 5-year-old son to Daniel Webster for his first day of kindergarten. He will walk to the tree-lined campus with buildings painted Early Harvest green and Lovely Lisa yellow and into a school with a waiting list of 5-year-olds who couldn't fit into the newly painted classrooms.

His classmates are his neighbors from up and down both sides of the hill, including four children from that group of eight parents.

A school in trouble

In 2006, almost all the school's children were poor, assigned to the school as a matter of course, many from nearby public housing; nearly half were learning English; and just 3 percent of the parents had graduated from college. The two or three white students were recent Eastern European immigrants.

Test scores were terrible, enrollment was plunging, and the school board was ready to shut it down.

The Potrero parents met to come up with a plan. They met for so long that first night that Stacey Bartlett went through two feeding cycles with her 5-month-old daughter cuddled in a Baby Bjorn.

They talked about how the population of the hill was changing, there were more children and the neighborhood would need the school - data they took to the school board.

With the help of former Mayor Art Agnos, a Potrero Hill resident, they bought some time; the board voted not to close the school and gave the group the go-ahead to try.

The pseudo-retired politician said he was tired of the same old cycle: Childless couples would move to the neighborhood. A year or two later they would be pushing a stroller.

"And then you see them with toddlers, and then they disappear," Agnos said.

Keeping families in San Francisco has been a tough political nut to crack. Housing is expensive, and the school system doesn't guarantee a seat at the closest kindergarten class.

The Potrero parents realized they needed a pipeline into Webster, not to mention curb appeal.

A preschool emerges

To make a three-year story short, they created a nonprofit called Potrero Residents Education Fund, raised $500,000 and started a nonprofit private preschool at Webster for 38 children, 25 percent of whom receive scholarships.

The preschool opened with a Spanish immersion program, which the parents helped push into the K-5 classrooms across the playground. The parents planted trees, painted, wrote grants, painted some more and started giving tours.

Agnos noted that the parents are not shrinking violets, with professional experience in law, marketing, business, government and other industries.

"I could run the city with these people, and they were full-time mothers," Agnos said.

Thinking back on all that time and effort, Betti started to cry.

"It has been a long haul," she said. "We just put so much time into it. Failure was not an option."

Principal Moraima Machado said it took a while to believe the parents wouldn't give up. But now, a sense of relief and excitement fills the halls.

"You are not thinking that you're going to be closed," Moraima said. "You know that there is a group of parents outside the school, that they want the school to be open. They want to send their children."

They want all children to thrive there, the principal said.

In 2008, the school was still among the lowest-scoring schools in the state. This year, scores rose significantly in math and English - progress made before the expected middle-class influx, when test scores can be expected to soar even higher.

Wealthier white and Asian students historically outscore their blacks and Hispanic peers. Yet the Potrero parents and the principal don't see their efforts as a gentrification of Webster, where white or wealthy kids move in, pushing others out.

"We're integrating it," said Bartlett, whose daughter is now 4. "The whole reason we bought our house was because we were two blocks from a school. This is where we want our children to go."